PSYCHOLOGIST |SEXOLOGIST | EDUCATOR

Tag Archives: CBT

Weekly! Ha, That’s what you get when your plans are too ambitious, failed weekly personal updates. We’ll just have to make do. Life has been good! A couple of weeks ago I organised the ‘Sushi Baby’ munch, a meeting for people who are interested in BDSM. We have dinner at an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant (which isn’t too bad for an all-you-can-eat) and meet up with other kinksters. It was fun, it was a lot, I felt full for days! And then a week later my family and I went to an all-you-can-eat wok-restaurant for my mom’s birthday, and that was fun, and a lot. And then yesterday my partners’ parents took us out to dinner, not an all-you-can-eat thankfully but it was a lot. Man, I love food.

I went to the 20-year anniversary of ‘PIC‘, the prostitution information centre in Amsterdam on the 24th this month. We went to visit the famous banana-bar, saw some shows at Casa Rosso, looked through the erotic museum and saw the Belle statue at the Wallen. I’m very happy we don’t put women in jail for having sex with other consenting adults just because someone doesn’t approve of our motivation to have sex. You can just walk through the red lights district, there’s tours where you can even visit one of the work-rooms for the women behind the windows, information on how to rent a window is visible for anyone. The Netherlands still is one of the safest, accepting, tolerant countries when it comes to sex and sex work.

But us Dutchies are working hard to change that. I recently read about a case in the Netherlands where a man was convicted of human trafficking because he lied to his (sex worker) girlfriend. She was a sex worker before she met him, gave him money because he promised her a future together, then he turned into an abusive bastard and left her for the girl he’d apparently been with the entire time. If she’d been a hairdresser there wouldn’t have been a case, but she was a sex worker, so human trafficking. Seriously. They even want special judges that are specialised in trafficking because it’s such an invisible and complex problem that regular judges get all misled and confused.. or something. But I met up with Peter Kwint, a politician who is involved in the 1012 project in Amsterdam and he was really cool and not anti-sex work at all and who knows he might change something so we’ve got that going for us which is nice. He bought me a lot of good beer and then let me partycrash some girl‘s birthday, it was great.

I’m back in school to become a cognitive-behavioural therapist! I still work as a therapist at Praktijk voor Seksuologie/Advies & Hulp of course, but it means I’m also keeping really busy with studying. And I have our cat Poes to keep me company. Aahw. So cute.

Marijke Vonk is a Dutch sex-positive psychologist specialised in working with sexual minorities. Besides working as a therapist, she is a writer and lecturer on various topics concerning sexuality. Main topics on this blog include kink, gender equality, sex workers' rights, non-monogamy and psychology.